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might leave?”
    “No.” She pats him on the hand. “But keep that to yourself. The principal at the high school is retiring next year. I’m trying to force the school board to name his successor.”
    You can actually see the relief on Teddy’s face.
    “Have June give me a call if she wants me to pick anything up.”
    “She’ll want some of that good olive oil,” Teddy says sadly, as if he knows his wife’s desires and would rather not think about them.
    When Teddy slides off his barstool, Lily offers to walk him out to the car, and when they’re gone I take the empty coffee cups over to the sink. From the kitchen window I can see the tops of their heads as they stand in the driveway below the deck and hear their muffled voices through the glass. Something about the way they’re standing there, some hint of heretofore unthinkable intimacy, causes me to imagine Teddy and Lily as lovers. I place them in our bed, Lily’s and mine, and for some reason Lily is on top. Probably because I can’t imagine Teddy on top. With Lily, with his own wife, with any woman over the age of eighteen. He’s just too apologetic. Even more bizarre, I imagine myself in the room with them, a witness on the brink of several possible but not necessarily compatible, or even valid, emotions—surprise, anger, jealousy, curiosity, excitement. I tell myself that if I’m a little detached from this imaginary betrayal, it’s because I know that Teddy and Lily are not lovers. In real life if Teddy’s fantasy ever came true, he’d confess it. He’d come to my office, haggard and happy and damned, and tell me what he’d done, then go out and buy a gun and shoot himself in the foot by way of comic penance, and then apologize all over again for lacking the courage to make a stronger statement. He’s an academic, after all, like the rest of us.
    When they share a quick hug and separate chastely, I’m almost disappointed. I think I hear Lily tell him to give her best to June, whom she hasn’t seen since when. Then Teddy asks her something that I can’t make out at first. What he wants to know, what I decide it sounds like, is whether Lily thinks I’m going to be okay. It occurs to me rather forcefully that he is not inquiring after my nose. I wish I could make out Lily’s response, but I can’t.
    Across the way, on top of the opposite hill, I can see Paul Rourke’s satellite dish partially obscured by tree branches, and it chooses this moment to search out a different satellite. Rourke’s dish is constantlyin motion. A compulsive pro basketball watcher, he’s always looking for feeds. I know it’s an optical illusion, but this time when the dish stops, it appears aimed directly at me. In a sci-fi movie, a beam of light would emit from its dark center and I would be reduced to cinders. Between the dish and me is my own pale reflection in the glass. I try to take Teddy’s question seriously, but for a man like me it’s not easy. Of course I’m going to be okay. True, this is not a young man’s face looking back at me from my kitchen window, but the nose is its only gruesome feature.
    I’m still engrossed in its purple swelling when Lily’s reflection appears behind mine and she observes sadly, “You can be
such
a jerk.”

CHAPTER
2
    As a rule I jog before dinner, but Teddy has thrown everything off by coming home with me and drinking coffee and flirting with Lily. By the time my wife and I finish a quiet supper, it’s almost dark, but there’s a full moon and very little traffic on our country road. I get into my sweats and go out onto the deck to loosen up. From there I can survey the thing we’ve for so long called our lives.
    The house—this house we’ve lived in since moving out of Railton—is situated at the top of a long, winding, tree-lined incline. Nestled down among the trees are a half dozen other houses, all more expensive than ours, all owned by university people—senior professors, administrators, a coach. In